


Bleeding Black

by FleshDust



Category: The Strain (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood Drinking, Existential Crisis, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Language, No Romance, One Shot, Sexual Content, Stress Relief, no romantic feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 04:57:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12183309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FleshDust/pseuds/FleshDust
Summary: Soldiers will always find ways to cope with the terrors of war.





	Bleeding Black

**Author's Note:**

> Little one-shot that popped into my head around four months ago. Wrote a scene between Quinlan and Dutch, but stalled when I started to think about their motivations. When Dutch had her breakdown in the show (after interrogating Desai), I figured that the stuff I had scribbled would fit with that event. Probably the only Quinlan thing I'll write. Dude's hot and all, but oh, Vaun. 
> 
> Thank you to majinkura for agreeing to beta this for me. =)

For a few moments, Quinlan wasn't quite sure that he'd heard what he thought he'd heard. His hearing was acutely sensitive, but the sound was so faint that even he had to crane his neck toward this noise that might not even have been there.

But it was there. The faint, muffled sobbing of a woman who he counted among his comrades. He recognized her voice immediately.

_Dutch Velders._

Usually, he could not allow himself to care about the vast spectrum of human emotions that often lay like a dense mist around his compatriots. It was too difficult, too distracting, a never-ending tide of human misery, joy, pleasure, pain and such black despair. It reminded him too much of a life he could never have, of emotions that he had learned to set aside during the millennia.

Still, he found himself following the wounded sound as it bounced off the walls and empty pipes in the waterworks where they currently hid.

He found her curled up against the wall in a corridor that was not often used, the concrete walls only dimly lit by bare bulbs that flickered every now and then, threatening to withdraw their light at any moment.

Her black-rimmed eyes were bloodshot and wet, her upper lip shiny with clear fluids from her nose. She wiped her face angrily with her ragged sleeve and looked up at him, the kohl around her eyes smudged and messy.

He had seen her apply the kohl, day after day after day, and only the kohl. No other paint followed, it was always just the kohl. At first, he had chalked it up to some type of compulsive vanity, but after a while, he had realized that it held a queer type of meaning for her.

Every day before she applied it, she stared at herself in whatever reflective surface that she was using at the time, a broken makeup mirror or a even a surface of stainless steel. As she did so, she looked like a defeated, suffering thing, damaged and full of self-pity and guilt.

After she applied it, her bearing always changed. Some tension left her body and rather than slouching, she squared her shoulders and her mien changed to one of grim determination.

He had realized that the seemingly meaningless kohl was her way of retaining some normalcy from a life that was likely gone for all time, while simultaneously providing her with insubstantial armor of some sort.

Perhaps a queer contemporary counterpart to war paint, whether she knew it or not. He suspected not.

As she blackened her eyes, she also raised a mental protection against the terrible things she might be, and had been, forced to do. A painted veil to hide her from the ghosts that were a result of her actions.

Quinlan knew his own ghosts well, and his veil was hatred and rage.

He had heard her fragile breakdown after her and Mr. Fet had finished interrogating Desai, the collaborator, this breeder of B-positives. She had been on the verge of hysterics, her mind bending dangerously. Fet had been able to calm her somewhat, but here she was, hiding from her fellow humans, sobbing brokenly yet again with a bottle containing the dregs of an amber-colored liquor in her hand.

“Quinlan,” she hissed, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“I heard you,” he replied, his delivery as deadpan as it had always been.

“So?”

She took another swig of her bottle, wiping her mouth after.

He actually started when she suddenly, furiously, hurled the bottle into the opposing wall of the corridor. It shattered with an explosion of shards that looked like ice. Quinlan turned his head to prevent the spray of glass reaching his eyes, otherwise they could embed themselves where they might. None did, simply bouncing off his black clothing and dead skin.

“To bloody hell with it,” she swore, at no one in particular. “Goddamnit.”

And then she started to weep again. Pitiful, deep sounds of despair emerged from her, causing her shoulders to shake as she hid her swollen face in her hands, her hair obscuring her tears further.

“I'll leave you alone,” Quinlan told her and turned to walk away when she called out to him.

“Quinlan, wait.”

Her voice was hoarse and raw.

“Yes?”

“How do you… how do you deal with it? Killing people. I can't… I don't know if I can go on like this. That asshole Desai was right. We're just as bad as he is. How much innocent blood is on our hands? On _all_ of our hands?”

“Ms.Velders,” he began, but changed his mind. “Dutch. This is war. People die in war.”

“Oh, don't give me that load of bollocks, Quinlan. Not _you_. Don't talk to me like I'm a bloody idiot. I know this is war. But how do you deal with it? I've killed _strigoi_ , and that's all well and good. But I've killed people. People who had done nothing except make bad choices in their allegiances.”

“Collaborators,” he countered, and watched her temper flare.

“They were still people. _Humans_. How am I supposed to deal with it?”

“I've killed thousands of humans. Innocents and guilty alike. What else can we do but fight?”

“I can't do it any longer. I can't.”

“Stop it,” he snarled ruthlessly. “You're being a weak wretch. Your sniveling is of no use to any of us right now.”

At that, her head snapped up and she was on her feet.

“Wretch, am I? You fucker.”

She flew at him faster than he though would have been possible, a swirl of oily blonde hair and rage, her fist crashing into his jaw. He was not prepared to evade her attack, having not expected this of her.

He felt her boot connect with his knee and he grunted, the pain allowing him to find his wits to block her subsequent blows until she was panting with effort and anger. Quinlan simply stood back from her and spat out a string of pale white blood.

“Fuck you, Quinlan, you…”

She came at him again in her impotent fury and frustration.

He captured her wrists when she tried to strike him again and after struggling and hissing at him for a few moments, she went slack. Once he was sure that she would not renew her efforts, he released her.

“You still fight,” he told her, “and you are _not_ that weak creature. You will find the strength to go on, like the rest of us. You need to hold it together.”

She said nothing, but did something that shocked him far more than her previous assault ever could. She stepped into him and put her arms around his midsection, holding him briefly. He did not reciprocate, unused to such proximity from a human.

She didn't seem to notice, or rather, he suspected that she didn't much care. She was simply seeking comfort from a creature that approximated a human, but was not.

His rapacious stinger started to throb in his chest when her human blood was so close, reminding him that he was hungry. He had teased his hunger with Desai’s wife, even though he hadn't really intended to drink her since it would have eliminated their leverage. The threat had worked swimmingly, though.

He remembered the way the talons of his proboscis had caught her dark hair, the shiny strands tangling in it. The scent of it, and the scent of her terror.

His stinger uttered a muffled, meaty noise from within him that snaked itself up through his throat and forced its way past his teeth with a rattling echo.

Dutch looked up at him and stepped out of their awkward, stiff embrace.

“When did you last feed?” She asked him, her demeanor much calmer now.

“It's been… some time.”

“Here,” she said, offering him her wrist. “Just don't make a full meal of it.”

“No, Dutch,” he said immediately. “I will not.”

“Just bloody do it,” she countered. “You're no use if you're mad with hunger, are you? What about ‘you need to hold it together?’”

Quinlan gritted his teeth, but nodded all the same. If there was blood to be had, he knew better than to deny it. Even if it did come from a fellow fighter.

He allowed himself only a little of her. Her hand clenched into a fist as his stinger connected, pierced her radial vein and started to provide him with the red fluid that he needed. He kept track of the milliliters that he drank by counting her heartbeats, and stopped at about half a pint.

He wanted more, and his displeased stinger gave an uncomfortable coiling motion as he forced it back into his chest, but still, he stopped. It would be enough for a small while, until till he could find something more substantial.

She withdrew her wrist after he had dislodged his stringer and examined the small wound left behind. A few beads of blood slipped out, and she brought her wrist to her mouth for a few moments.

She embraced him once more then. Her arms went around his shoulders, and for propriety, he reciprocated, patting her back a bit, something he had seen humans do as they comforted each other.

He didn't even realize that her lips had closed over his until she whimpered into his mouth, her fingers digging into the back of his neck. She tasted of liquor and anguish and the blood she had licked off her wrist.

Quinlan intended to draw back, he really did. But he could not, no matter how much his mind screamed for him to do so. He hadn't even considered her in this manner, not ever. She was a fellow soldier, a hunter, and her being female had little do with her battle prowess. She was a worthy comrade.

Still, his body responded violently with a sensation of starvation of a different kind.

They didn't speak, and with a few swift motions, he had divested her of her trousers, opened his own and lifted her against the wall. She hooked her thighs around his waist and clasped her arms around his neck as he slid against her, his hands supporting her weight by gripping the underside of her thighs.

She gasped when she felt his much hotter flesh against hers, but as Quinlan angled his hips in order to penetrate her, he noticed that she was weeping again. The planes under her eyes were wet and the black stains there were bleeding again. It disturbed him enough to allow him to temporarily suppress the urges that had slumbered within him for a long time.

He would _not_ force her. He wondered to himself if there was any possible way he could have misinterpreted her actions.

Quinlan withdrew slightly from her, leaning back, asking her if she really wanted this. Her only reply was a curt nod and she offered no resistance. Her arms tightened around his neck as he pushed himself into her with a low growl. She responded with a small cry.

He had not been with a woman for a long time, and at first, his movements were unsure and deficient. But after a few moments, he gained his rhythm and allowed himself to forget himself in her flesh.

A continuous, raspy growl crackled inside of him and he buried his face in her neck as he took her, listening to her small groans, inhaling the scent of human blood, stale sweat, black misery and the oily scent of her unwashed, blonde tresses. Her breath brushed his ear with silent gasps. He thought he smelled arousal as well, but he might have imagined it. He preferred to pretend that it was there.

She inhaled sharply after a few minutes when he thrust deep one final time and spent himself. Her weeping had abated now, and when he relaxed his hold on her she sighed with something that he hoped was pleasure, however small, or at the very least, not disgust or discomfort.

They stayed like that for a while, Quinlan allowing her rapid breathing to even out. The throbbing of her pulse on the inside of her thigh where it still pressed against his hip slowed.

He disentangled from her carefully. She grunted softly when his flesh left hers, her face inscrutable. He set her down, situated himself and closed his trousers. He then retrieved hers and helped her squirm into them, closing them for her as she stood there, silent, her kohl-smudged eyes on his hands as he fiddled with the zipper.

“Are you well?” He asked her after she was clothed again.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “You?”

He nodded, but was still completely unsure of what the consequences of this event that they had shared might be.

“Did I harm you?”

“No,” she responded absentmindedly, reaching out for where she apparently thought she had left her bottle, then remembering that she had smashed it.

She rolled her eyes at herself and muttered a thoroughly British curse that he could not decipher, for all of the languages he had been exposed to during the millennia he had walked upon this Earth.

“Is this what you wanted?” He asked her, uncomfortable with the whole situation and irritated at himself for allowing the urges he usually controlled well to overtake him.

He started to back away from her but was stopped by her hand grasping his black sleeve.

“Quinlan, I did. I just needed… I just needed _something_.”

She sighed, sliding down along the wall into a sitting position.

He joined her hesitantly, leaning against the wall and crouching down next to her. They both kept their eyes forward. He could not sense any scorn from her, no shame, no indignation at his actions, simply a small bit of calm that had not been there before.

She spoke again.

“Here we are,” she said, “two monsters, maiming and killing for the greater good.”

Quinlan had no reply for her statement.

“In any case,” she continued, wiping her face with her sleeve, “thank you. For… for…”

“For something,” he finished for her.

At last, she uttered a small chuckle that relieved him.

“Yes. For something.”

He rose then, extending his hand to help her up, but she shook her head.

“I think I'll stay here for a while,” she said. “I'll see you later, yeah?”

“Yes, he agreed,” and turned to leave, but looked back at her one last time.

“Dutch,” he growled softly, “You will have to live with it, like the rest of us. Our paths are difficult, and we will walk them for the rest of our days. But at least they are _our_ paths.”

She nodded once, and he turned once more, leaving her where he had found her. She was not weeping any longer.

They never spoke of their shared interaction, nor did they ever tell anyone about it. They both knew that there were no feelings between them other than their shared camaraderie and their shared mission, yet soldiers would always find ways to counter the carnage that their hands had wrought.

He had seen it time and time again. The drowning of horrors in a mug of ale. Tempers that exploded when the ghosts of stolen lives crept near. The use of pharmaceuticals of modern industry, legal or not. Other substances of more illicit origin in the forms of pills or liquids injected desperately into collapsing, festering veins.

Perhaps most of all, he'd had seen the fevered lust after battle, the brief encounters that meant little beyond a release of tension and the sharing of burdens. And now he was part of it. Their interlude had simply been their own way to try to cope with the roles they played in this terrible new world, an addition to the paint that eventually bled away.

 

 


End file.
